DHL cargo plane crashes into house near Lithuania airport, killing one; 3 pain

On By Pranco

By Andrius Sytas

VILNIUS (Reuters) – A DHL cargo plane crashed into a house early on Monday as it approached to land at Lithuania’s Vilnius airport, killing one person and injuring three others, officials said.

The flight was operated by airline SWIFT on behalf of DHL and had taken off from Leipzig, Germany before the plane crashed at around 0330 GMT, a spokesman for the government’s National Crisis Management Center said.

All people in the house survived, he added.

According to the spokesperson, there is nothing to indicate that an explosion preceded the crash.

“At this time we have no record that an explosion has occurred,” he said.

An airport spokesman said the plane was a Boeing 737-400.

Police told a news conference that 12 people had been evacuated from the house hit by the plane.

Rescuers said the plane hit the ground and slid at least 100 meters before crashing into the building.

The head of the national crisis management center said the cause of the crash was under investigation.

Firefighters were seen at 05:30 GMT pouring water on a smoking building some 1.3 km (0.8 mi) north of the airport runway. A large police and ambulance presence was seen in the area and several nearby main streets were cordoned off.

The flight had departed Leipzig at 02:08 GMT, Flightradar24 said on social media platform X.

Germany is investigating several fires caused earlier this year by incendiary devices hidden in packages in a warehouse in Leipzig, the country’s attorney general said in October.

Britain’s counter-terrorism police said shortly afterwards that they were investigating a warehouse fire in July caused by a package that caught fire, and were liaising with other European law enforcement agencies to see if there was a link to similar incidents elsewhere.

(Reporting by Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; additional reporting by Stine Jacobsen, writing by Anna Ringstrom, editing by Himani Sarkar, Kim Coghill, Michael Perry, Lincoln Feast and Bernadette Baum)